


The Long Road to Honeymoon Haven (Crosses Many Rivers and Burns Many Bridges)

by Princip1914



Series: Summer of 1969 Road Trip [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: And also actual pine trees, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Aziraphale does not like The Doors, I did this for the aesthetic, Implied Sexual Content, Is the real star of this show, M/M, Marriage, Other, Pining, Road trip across America, Ruins, Shlocky 1970s era decor, Songfic, Sort Of, Summer of Love - Freeform, The Colorado River, The Grand Canyon, The Pocono Mountains and Versailles really are very similar, honeymoon resorts, very hand wavy approach to American geography
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 08:41:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24348190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Princip1914/pseuds/Princip1914
Summary: They were halfway across America when Crowley suggested it, offhand as though he didn’t care, while the low slung fields of Kansas or maybe Nebraska sped past the windows and storm clouds hovered like a distant thought on the horizon.“Yes,” Aziraphale had said, and thus their road trip which had, until that point been a meandering series of temptations and blessings, spiraling around a hidden center neither of them dared to examine in detail, acquired a fixed destination.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Summer of 1969 Road Trip [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1741231
Comments: 44
Kudos: 86





	The Long Road to Honeymoon Haven (Crosses Many Rivers and Burns Many Bridges)

**Author's Note:**

> The final installment in the Tom Himbos saga. [Part One](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23856823) and [Part Two](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24131596) will help with context for this story, but you can understand it without them. 
> 
> This fic has a period appropriate soundtrack, because I am deep in the weeds now and I can’t get out send help: 
> 
> [Somebody to Love by Jefferson Airplane](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-C9pUGszsw)
> 
> [The End by The Doors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXqPNlng6uI)  
> (note this is specifically not the version with the helicopter sounds from Apocalypse Now, but the uncut song is 11 minutes long and you really only need the first few minutes for the vibe)
> 
> [Feeling Good performed by Nina Simone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5Y11hwjMNs)
> 
> Please also take a look at this [wonderful art](https://sungmee.tumblr.com/post/618968341221081088/this-was-something-i-made-after-conversation-in) which somewhat inspired this installment!

They were halfway across America when Crowley suggested it, offhand as though he didn’t care, while the low slung fields of Kansas or maybe Nebraska sped past the windows and storm clouds hovered like a distant thought on the horizon. 

When Aziraphale tried to remember the moment later, as he often did, he could not recall the exact words that Crowley had used. He could only picture his smile, a hesitant and rare flash of teeth. Could only remember the way the wind from the open window had carried with it the scent of sundrenched corn and oncoming rain. 

It was a garish sort of temptation, which is how Crowley later rationalized his question. (It was Aziraphale’s wide eyes, blue as the storm clouds that gathered behind them. It was the gentle, sure way his hands cradled their guidebook, a tattered thing they had picked up in the bargain bin of a used bookshop in Arizona. It was the way he had shuffled closer to Crowley days ago at the rim of the Grand Canyon. The way he asked, ‘just a moment longer,’ when Crowley moved to turn away from the vast expanse of air and distance beneath their feet.)

“Read about it in the guide book,” Crowley had said. “Would you want to go?” 

It was an opportunity to bless young couples in love, which is how Aziraphale later thought to justify his answer. (It was the small white fangs Crowley forgot to hide when he was distracted, peeking out of the corner of his lip. It was the tousle of his red hair in the breeze, the enthusiasm with which he insisted on stopping at the most outlandish roadside attractions. _The world’s largest ball of twine! Angel, we can’t miss it!_ It was the play of scales over the strong delicate bones of his feet while he drove barefoot and free across a vast land.) 

“Yes,” Aziraphale had said, and thus their trip which had, until that point been a meandering series of temptations and blessings, spiraling around a hidden center neither of them dared to examine in detail, acquired a fixed destination. 

***

Far from the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, in a motel off of Interstate 80 where the mattress creaked and summer rain blew in the open window, Crowley was, as was his wont, asking questions. 

“Tell me what it will be like when we get to Honeymoon Haven?” he asked. 

“It will be lovely,” Aziraphale said. “Three pools to swim in whenever you want.” 

“Mmm cool water on the scales is just the thing. Indulgent on a hot summer day…What else?” 

Aziraphale’s fingers were in Crowley’s hair and Crowley was naked and Aziraphale was naked and they were sated and soft, nestled into the circle of each other's arms. But this was an _else_ they could not discuss, so instead, Aziraphale cleared his throat and said, “there will be dancing in the evenings, in a ballroom with a parquet floor and mirrors all over the walls.” 

“Just like Versailles,” Crowley’s eyes had gone soft and sleepy. “I read the suites are lovely too--” 

“Yes,” Aziraphale picked up the thread. “Plush red shag carpet everywhere, a hot tub shaped like a champagne glass. A bed shaped like a heart….” 

***

Kansas flowed into Nebraska. Nebraska flowed into Iowa. Omaha to Shelby to Casey to Van Meter, then Des Moines rising like a castle in the distance above a feudal fiefdom. Prairie City, Homestead. Soon, they would cross the wide Mississippi, walk hand in hand on the banks of Lake Michigan in Chicago, cut again across the plains until they reached the Ohio River and climb into the mountains of Appalachia. At night, fireflies rose up from the fields around them. Cicadas called in the evenings. During the day, the sun was bright and hot. All the rivers were wide and slow and muddy. The radio played the distorted noise that passed for bebop these days. Crowley hummed along to it, tapped the rhythm of it with his fingers on the steering wheel. 

“--just you wait, I’m sure there will be temptations around every corner!” Crowley was very handsome in his round shades, one hand on the wheel, the other hanging out the open window. “A bar by the poolside, topless swimming, _jazz_ , angel! Dancing!” 

“It can’t be _that_ sinful!” Aziraphale sniffed, “look, it says here a marriage certificate is required to reserve a room.” 

The wind rushed by the opened windows. They were just south of North Liberty, Iowa. They were off the map entirely. Crowley’s face was inscrutable when Aziraphale chanced a peek at its reflection in the rear view mirror. The radio crooned on, unaware of the sudden sharp silence in the car. 

_Don’t you want somebody to love.  
Don’t you need somebody to love. _

“Should I...miracle something up then, or…” Crowley asked, barely audible above the noise of the highway. 

_Wouldn’t you love somebody to love.  
You better find somebody to love. _

“I wouldn’t want you to go to all that bother,” Aziraphale said, wiping his suddenly sweaty palms on his immaculate slacks. “I’m sure there’s a courthouse nearby.” 

***

“Is it really as grand as they say?” Crowley had asked, days earlier, getting out of the car to stand by Aziraphale. The engine pinged gently as it cooled. 

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, glancing up at Crowley. “Come look.” 

Crowley shuffled closer. It was morning. They had driven overnight from the Salton Sea to get here at dawn. Sunlight was falling on the far rim of the canyon, but the depths of it were still smoke blue with twilight. The sunlight fell in Aziraphale’s hair, lighting it like a halo above his smoke blue eyes. 

Below them, hawks rode on thermals in the canyon air. In a parallel plane of existence, Crowley ruffled his feathers and thought of rising with the birds on the warm breeze, coasting all the way across to the sunlit rock on the other side, impossibly far away. 

Aziraphale’s polaroid camera was still in the car, but Crowley didn’t need it. He would remember Aziraphale like this, in crystal clear definition, for the rest of his eternal life. Years later, when he lay on the ceiling at night and could not sleep, he would think about Aziraphale silhouetted against the pine trees, and he would remember the impression of flying without wings, the glint of the river below. 

“Well, then,” Crowley said, when the sunlight had reached the valley floor, when day had broken properly above them. “Shall we?” 

“Just a moment,” Aziraphale said, his profile gold with the sun. “Just a moment longer, if you please.” 

***

A ceiling fan moved the stifling air, rustled the papers on a desk in the back room of the Johnson County Civil Court. 

“I do,” Aziraphale said, plain and simple. 

“I do,” Crowley said, plain and simple. 

Crowley, in deference to local custom, had worn a dress. Aziraphale, after much deliberation, had extracted a seersucker suit, miraculously free of wrinkles, from one of the large suitcases in the trunk of the car and changed the human way in the courthouse bathroom. Crowley had helped him with the bow tie, sliding the knot tight with trembling fingers. 

Same sex marriage was still decades away from legalization in the state of Iowa, but this consideration did not even occur as a potential obstacle to two beings for whom gender ranked somewhat lower than fashion choice in terms of importance (“I’m a demon, I’m not wearing white,” Crowley had protested, minutes earlier, batting away the sly curl of Aziraphale’s miracle clinging to the hem of his dress). They did not think it would be a problem, and so it was not. They did not know about witnesses or waiting periods, and so these, too, were not concerns. 

“Sign here,” the judge said. Crowley did not dare sign his true name. Aziraphale, darting him an unreadable glance from under lowered eyelashes, did not sign his true name either. 

And then there was the press of lips, humid and brief, and it was done. 

It was not difficult to do, and Crowley did not feel differently afterwards. But as they stood blinking in the Iowa sun as man-shaped creature and wife, Crowley found himself, as he often would in the days that followed, running his thumb over the inside of the band on his finger. The weight of it was smooth and cool like running water over worn sandstone. If left for long enough, Crowley feared it was liable to cause a deep gash. 

Crowley held the cheap cardstock certificate between his thumb and finger and thought about what he would do with such an absurd piece of paper. He thought about framing it behind the Mona Lisa in his apartment, he thought about shoving it in a folder labeled “taxes” by his bedside table, he thought he might cherish it, privately and forever, in some secret place it would never be found. 

(He would burn it, in the bathroom of a non-descript motel in Kentucky. As the smoke curled plaintively in the bathtub Crowley would try and fail to be angry at anyone but himself, would try and fail at blocking out the sound of a suitcase rolling across the floor and a door opening and shutting. Crowley would turn on the tap and run the water to wash the ashes down the drain, to cover the brief but final click of a key turning in the lock). 

***

Their third day in America dawned. The gash in the land was deeper than the walls of Eden were high. 

Aziraphale said, “Come look.” 

Crowley stepped out of the shadows by the car and the light fell suddenly on his face, bloomed in his fiery hair and golden eyes like a benediction. 

Below them, hawks tumbled on thermals in the canyon air. Aziraphale thought of tumbling down with them, a long slow fall through the pine scented air to the promise of the river, cool and secret, rushing below. Crowley stood next to him, wreathed in brightness. Much later, on nights when he found he was too restless to read, Aziraphale would recall the chasm, the swooping desert birds. The fall would be pleasant. Aziraphale was sure of it; he could not shake the thought. It would feel like flying. 

“Well, then,” Crowley said, when the sunlight had reached the valley floor, when day had broken properly above them. “Shall we?” 

“Just a moment,” Aziraphale said, watching Crowley watching the sun creep down the canyon walls. “Just a moment longer, if you please.” 

***

In a motel along Interstate 80, as the trucks rumbled past outside, the rainstorm that had been following them for days finally broke. Thunder rumbled outside and shook the windows. Lightning flashed bright as a flaming sword. The window was open; rain blew inside and the air was full of the smell of ozone and wet earth. 

Crowley was curled around Aziraphale, so deep inside him that Aziraphale could be forgiven for thinking they were not two separate beings, but one. Their fingers tangled together on the bedspread and Crowley’s silver band clinked against Aziraphale’s gold one. Crowley’s mouth was on the back of Aziraphale’s neck, a quick drag of teeth, a bruise sucked in just below his hairline, lips that formed three silent words against his skin that could not be said out loud. Aziraphale shuddered (in pleasure, in grief) and spilled in a sticky rush on the starched motel sheets beneath him. 

Later, sated, holding one another in the darkness, Crowley nosed into Aziraphale’s neck and whispered, “Tell me what it will be like when we get to Honeymoon Haven?

***

They never made it to Honeymoon Haven. In West Virginia, by tacit, mutual agreement, Crowley swung the wheel south rather than north, following the current of the wide Shenandoah. To arrive at Honeymoon Haven would be to arrive at an ending and the unspoken urge lay heavy between them to put it off, just a moment longer. But, as the promise of the Pocono Mountains receded in the rear view mirror, they drove towards an ending all the same. 

Aziraphale sat in the bus station in Lexington, Kentucky and worried the golden band around his ring finger. It was the same ring he had worn on his pinky all these years, resized in a fit of madness, handed over with trembling fingers outside of a courthouse in Iowa only to be slid gently into a new location moments later, a tectonic shift in the geography of Aziraphale’s hand. The bus station attendant was playing the radio, which crackled with more of Crowley’s newfangled music, unsettling and sad. 

_This is the end, beautiful friend.  
This is the end, my only friend, the end. _

Aziraphale wondered where Crowley was now, if he was still at the motel. He wondered if Crowley had taken off his ring. He hoped he had. He hoped he had not. 

(Crowley had taken off his ring. He held it over the shower drain for nearly thirty minutes as the water ran, but he could not release it from his fingers. In future years, reckless with longing and the approaching the end of the world, he would wear it, fashioned as a chain around his neck, into Hell itself. But then, in the bathroom of a motel twenty miles east of the Lexington Kentucky bus station, he knew only that no power on earth--or above or below--could compel him to throw it away.)

_Of our elaborate plans, the end  
Of everything that stands  
The end _

Aziraphale removed the ring and slipped it back over his pinky. There was the faintest tan line in its shape on his ring finger, a testament to the strong American sun. Aziraphale erased that too with a slight miracle. 

_No safety no surprise  
The end _

(Crowley stood. His shirt was wet at the front from leaning over the running faucet. His cheeks were wet too. He shut the door of the bathroom behind him and shrugged into his blazer, collected from the side of the bed he had come to think of as his own. He tucked the ring into the breast pocket, where it would live for years, a cold silver weight, like a fish about to be gutted.)

_I’ll never look into your eyes  
again. _

“Please, could you turn that noise off,” Aziraphale snapped at the station attendant, voice breaking as suddenly as a dam bursting. “Please?”

***

The stiff motel pillowcase crinkled beneath Crowley’s cheek. He was very near and very warm. It was their third night together like humans, the night after their trip to the Grand Canyon. 

“Are you glad?” Crowley asked. It was close as he dared to a question he knew he could not ask. 

“Very glad,” Aziraphale said. It was close as he dared to an answer he couldn’t yet give. “Are you?”

“Yes,” Crowley said, reaching across the space between them. 

Aziraphale shifted to lie on top of Crowley. Crowley sighed up into the weight of him, pulled him closer, pulled him inside. 

The next day, as the storm clouds formed over the plains of the midwest, and Crowley drove a sedate twenty miles above the speed limit, he turned to Aziraphale and asked, “have you ever heard of a place called the Honeymoon Haven?” 

***

Later, much later, after the end of the world had threatened and then suddenly abated, Aziraphale worried his lip at the sight of the sign, overcome with vines and vegetation. “I should have checked that they were still open,” he sighed. “These human things come and go so quickly.” 

Crowley was thinking of a storm over Iowa, a cleansing rain that had come and gone more than half a century ago, was thinking of birds rising and tumbling through thermals in an incomprehensibly vast rift in the land. 

“No matter, angel,” he said, and extended a hand to help Aziraphale over the chain link fence. 

Saplings grew up through cracks in the driveway and the topiary had twisted itself into wild and outlandish shapes. 

At the main entrance, glass crunched beneath their feet. 

“Oh my dear,” Aziraphale said, concern darkening his angelic features. 

“Don’t worry about me,” Crowley murmured. “S’ why I’ve got scales.” But he did not protest, even a little, when Aziraphale swept one hand beneath his knees and the other beneath his arms and carried him across the threshold. 

Inside was gloomy, damp, and smelled of mildew. Rats had eaten away at the plush carpet of the entryway and it was bare to the concrete in places and piled up in little tufts in others. Someone had spray painted a crude word for male anatomy on the cracked mirror behind the front desk. 

Crowley let Aziraphale carry him through this liminal space into an even darker hallway and then out again to a vast room lit in dappled yellow green by sunlight falling through large and numerous holes in the ceiling. The wind shifted the tree canopy high above the crumbling roof and the light shifted with it, played across the peeling linoleum faux-parquet floor like the current of a river. Rotted wood paneling alternated with floor to ceiling mirrors on the walls. An old record player lay discarded in a pile of rubble in the corner. 

“Dancing, and swimming, and champagne glass hot tubs, and heart shaped beds.” Crowley murmured into Aziraphale’s neck. 

“My dear,” Aziraphale’s face was drawn and sad. “I’m afraid that’s all gone now.” 

“Nonsense,” Crowley blinked at him and shifted in Aziraphale’s arms. Aziraphale settled him carefully back down on the floor. 

Crowley held out a hand and as he did so, the record player in the corner righted itself and a warped record straightened itself out and settled on the deck. The needle obligingly slotted itself into the groves. 

“You’ve just got to have a bit of imagination,” Crowley said over the hissing scratch of the needle. 

A woman’s voice began to sing, slow and deep. 

_Birds flying high, you know how I feel.  
Sun in the sky, you know how I feel. _

“Oh, I like this,” Aziraphale said, surprised. 

“S’ good,” Crowley said, still holding out a hand. “Knew you’d like it. I’d take Nina Simone over Handel or Bach any day. Much nicer in person too. Don’t leave me hanging here, angel.” Crowley wiggled his fingers enticingly. 

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, still not taking Crowley’s hand. Not yet. “Do you regret it? Our summer of 1969?” 

Crowley blinked at him in the gloom, lowered his hand. “I wanted to regret it. The way you were with me afterwards--frosty. You wouldn’t talk to me or answer my calls for twenty years. I tried to regret it,” he said. “I couldn’t.”

“I felt I should regret it,” Aziraphale reached out to close the gap between them. “And I do regret--I do regret my silence. I regret how afraid I was afterwards. But I never-- I never could regret that summer.” 

There was much more to be said, and unsaid, but there was time enough now to say it in. All the time in the world in fact. 

Crowley pulled Aziraphale into a slow, gentle sway.

_Fish in the sea, you know how I feel  
River running free, you know how I feel _

“I burned the certificate,” Crowley murmured eventually into Aziraphale’s hair. “In the bathtub, while you were packing.” 

“I don’t think that counts as an annulment.” 

“Shall we celebrate our honeymoon then?” Crowley asked, shaking his wings out into the mortal plane.

“My dear,” Aziraphale pulled Crowley closer, unfurled his own spotless white wings. “My darling. I could think of nothing I’d like to do more.”

“Hey!” a portly man in a security uniform pounded on the cracked glass of the entryway, oblivious to the crackling hiss of the record player and two pairs of wings, one light and one dark, folded around one another. “Hey, it’s illegal to be in there! I could have you arrested for trespassing, you know!” 

But Aziraphale and Crowley, swept up in the dance, swept up in the memory of a past that could not have been and in the promise of a future that finally would be, were not listening.

**Author's Note:**

> I enjoyed writing this short series a great deal. Thank you all for coming on this journey with me. 
> 
> After publishing this fic, I will have put more than 100k words on AO3 in the past calendar year. I can’t imagine a better fic with which to achieve this goal. 
> 
> The Honeymoon Haven is not a real place, but is a version of several places, most notably Penn Hills and Cove Haven, both in the Pocono Mountains. You can still stay at Cove Haven (Penn Hills is permanently closed). Catch me booking a room as soon as this global pandemic nightmare is over. 
> 
> [Come stop by on tumblr](https://princip1914.tumblr.com) for more wild Americana Omens musings.


End file.
